There’s no question HR teams are excited about AI. 25% of HR teams are already using artificial intelligence in some way, and most teams are optimistic that AI can add to their productivity and success. However, even those HR teams already using AI have barely scratched the surface.
AI solutions designed primarily to generate new material (generative AI) or to retrieve answers to basic questions aren’t always able to meet the needs of HR teams who handle complex questions, regulatory environments, and employee needs. In a worst-case scenario, HR teams are stuck using AI tools designed for other teams, included “for free” with other tools (like project management or internal communication apps), or that only work in specific, rigidly defined contexts. These tools require constant human oversight and rarely help to resolve the countless employee queries bottlenecking HR teams compared to agentic AI.
Automating a task once might save minutes, but the team saves that time whenever the task comes up. For HR teams handling resource intensive employee requests, that adds up fast. The rise of agentic AI offers HR teams the ability to confidently hand off and automate routine tasks and processes, freeing them up to better serve their organizations as strategic partners.
What is agentic AI?
Agentic AI refers to AI systems designed to autonomously act on behalf of a user, pursue complex goals, and enact workflows with limited direct human supervision. At its core, agentic AI aims to operate more like a human employee — understanding context and instructions in natural language, setting appropriate goals, reasoning through subtasks, and adapting decisions and actions based on changing conditions.
Agentic AI is a notable advancement in AI capabilities, and unlike traditional AI tools or chabots, it is able to access multiple tools and data sets, modify its output as it works, and take actions on your behalf, understand and execute tasks based on a natural language conversation). Most often, this takes the form of an AI assistant tool or copilot platform, designed to help users by automating tasks, providing information, and facilitating decision-making processes, through a conversational chat interface.
For example, take a simple process with multiple steps, like submitting a PTO request. You’ll need to confirm that your PTO plans work with the time off policies, submit the request, and then block your calendar in another tool. Agentic AI can check internal policies, PTOs balances, access both tools, and accomplish this task.
An AI search application or basic chatbot designed only to return information might be able to tell you about PTO policies or be able to check your calendar and confirm dates. Valuable information to be sure, but low stakes in terms of saving time. Asking an agentic AI copilot to accomplish these kinds of tasks instead of simply returning information saves hours across an enterprise when multiplied across thousands of employees.
How does agentic AI differ from other kinds of AI?
Most AI can simply respond to tasks rather than use reasoning to help execute and resolve tasks. Traditional AI tools are unable to understand context, set goals, use reasoning, or adapt their actions. For example, narrow AI tools like a spell-checker or a website chatbot, were built especially to perform particular tasks, analyze specific sets of data, or respond to questions based on their training data.
Generative AI tools, like ChatGPT, were a big step forward for AI. Generative AI functionality enables AI tools to search and summarize from specific data provided (think “summarize this meeting transcript” or “what is our PTO policy” prompts). Generative AI can create new content and extract key points from existing data and condense them into summaries. While generative AI may generate better output than traditional AI or more specialized AI tools, this AI struggles to compete with the reasoning or actioning abilities of agentic AI.
How does agentic AI work?
Agentic AI can understand and interpret complex and nuanced context and goals, allowing for more sophisticated interactions and decision-making processes. It accomplishes these tasks using advanced reasoning and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG).
Combined with multiple large language models (LLMs) and natural language, reasoning engines help AI agents correctly interpret user requests, use built-in policies so that agents know which plugins and tools is able to be most useful in a given situation, and gives the AI agents the ability to modify their plan based on initial outputs.
Agentic AI requires specific reasoning engines. Combined with multiple LLMs and natural language, reasoning engines help AI agents correctly interpret user requests. These reasoning engines should also use built-in policies so that agents know which plugins and tools are able to be most useful in a given situation, use security and data best practices, and ensure users only access authorized information. For example, “My boss” is analyzed by the reasoning engine and associated with the employee record for the manager of the user working with the AI. “PTO” and “time off” are seen as synonyms in the proper context.
Agentic AI in HR
Human resources teams are well-positioned to take advantage of agentic AI capabilities because they regularly handle repetitive, personalized employee requests and business processes. Automation helps with repetitive tasks, while a reasoning engine ensures the AI copilot can handle complex problems involving multiple steps and tools. Here’s how agentic AI applies across different HR use cases.
Talent acquisition
Junior recruiters have already started using AI for candidate sourcing and simple outreach templates, while recruiting leaders often use AI to help quickly generate job descriptions. Agentic AI goes beyond these applications and offers ways to automate more complex tasks. Recruiting tasks easily handled by agentic AI can include:
- Scheduling interviews
- Reminding team members to provide feedback after interviews
- Getting approval for job descriptions
- Comparing candidate pools from different sources
AI support on these tasks means recruiters can better focus on strategic goals and be true talent advisors.
Onboarding
Onboarding new employees is often partially automated today, but agentic AI supports HR teams when employee onboarding is manual, time-consuming, and can bottleneck new employee productivity.
While simple AI able to help new employees find the time off policy, enter their personal information in your HRIS, or find the employee handbook, HR teams working with agentic AI can also:
- Help new employees get access to tools and software
- Help to set up direct deposit
- Analyze employee profiles to suggest personalized onboarding programs
Agentic AI platforms like Moveworks also give teams the ability to build and set up custom agents in Creator Studio. Onboarding workflows, which can differ from role to role, are perfect candidates for automation.
These agents can be customized for your team’s onboarding processes and use plugins to integrate with your existing HR tools. Just imagine on day one: new engineers able to access JIRA and new marketers gaining access to Google Analytics, while both are able to chat with a copilot to easily resolve questions and gain critical application access.
Performance management
Performance management feels like a logical spot for AI to assist with repetitive tasks, but asking ChatGPT to write employee reviews is dangerous at best. The risk of hallucinations—and removal of the personal element—means that managers still need to provide human input during performance management.
However, agentic AI may help managers connect tools to automatically:
- Track complex KPIs
- Map work in progress to those KPIs
- Track improvement over time across tools and processes
- Automate communication about upcoming performance reviews
Agents help to free up human managers to work directly with team members instead of spending time updating goal trackers.
Learning and development
Because employees don’t always take advantage of learning opportunities, learning and development tasks frequently become employee engagement tasks. Agentic AI can help with the administrative tasks that go with L&D programs, like approving designated development funds for employees, but advanced agentic platforms can also create reminders and notifications about deadlines to help make sure employees make the most of your L&D program. Agentic AI helps to also look at performance reviews and other material to make L&D recommendations specific to employee goals. In summary, it supports L&D by:
- Helping with administrative tasks (approvals, etc)
- Creating reminders and notifications about deadlines
- Reviewing employee information to make specific recommendations
Benefits enrollment
Benefits enrollment may be a “low-level pain” for most employees, but can be a huge challenge to manage for HR teams. It happens once a year, yet it’s constantly changing and never the same thing twice. Efficiently distributing information, reminding employees to enroll, and following up on employee questions can feel like—and sometimes is—a full-time job.
Automating benefits enrollment with AI feels fraught because most AI platforms are focused only on information retrieval. Agentic AI helps with:
- Answering follow up questions, even if the answers live in a different application.
- Enabling employees make changes to accounts
- Enabling employees file tickets with internal systems
Using multiple language models to better understand employee questions also means the AI copilot can successfully navigate questions that require more than a search engine.
Compliance
Agentic AI may also help with compliance. AI copilots can prompt acknowledgment of employee handbooks and other important documents, then create written records of that acknowledgment. Communication about updated certifications and recertifications can be automated and sent to the appropriate employees without human intervention.
Other compliance tasks that HR business partners may hand off to agentic AI:
- Tracking and logging HR cases
- Sending security training reminders
- Legal name and address updates
HR teams handle many tasks for candidates, employees, managers, and teams. Agentic AI is the logical productivity partner for HR because it takes goal-directed actions across every HR use case, application, and subtask.
Why agentic AI helps HR teams
With agentic AI, HR teams get time back they would otherwise spend on repetitive tasks. Agentic AI is best at taking on tasks that have just enough friction to be difficult for most employees – but just enough repetitiveness to be inefficient for a dedicated team. For large organizations, being able to respond to thousands of employees with minimal human intervention means massive gains in productivity, cost savings, and risk management for every team.
Also critical for HR teams, agentic AI supports employee satisfaction by helping reach employees where they are. Agentic copilots’ ability to dynamically respond to changing contexts and questions in natural language makes employees more likely to ask the question. Now it is far less likely that they will want to “go to HR” and wait hours or days for answers, as AI agents are typically much faster, enabling your HR team to instead focus on your most critical initiatives.
Implementing agentic AI with your HR team
Agentic AI isn’t meant to replace human touch and isn’t a replacement for a skilled, dedicated HR team. Agentic AI helps HR teams to drastically reduce repetitive, manual tasks and the compounding benefits of automating these tasks with AI means organizations are better able to reach their full potential.
At Moveworks, our Agentic AI Copilot helps HR engage and support every employee by automating tasks across HR applications, while our Creator Studio enables your company to build customized integrations and AI agents for your needs. Discover what's possible when your HR team is able to automate repetitive tasks – and focus on how they can best support your organization.
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